The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

If Assad loses control of his armed forces and the regime
loses its legitimacy as the expression of Syrian nationalism, the ingredients
don’t seem there for a Lebanon-style civil war with local proxies armed by
regional or global actors.

That’s because I don’t think that Russia, China, or even
Iran see any upside in arming some Ba’ath regime generals of primarily Alawite
backgrounds trying to beat back an insurrection powered largely by Syria’s
dominant Sunni majority.

Alawites are estimated at 12% of Syria’s largely Sunni
population and don’t look to do well if the Syrian uprising transforms into an
explicitly sectarian confrontation.

Lebanon, on the other hand, is split between Christians,
Sunnis, and Shi’ites with no one group holding a clear demographic advantage
(especially since there hasn’t been an official census in Lebanon for decades),
providing multiple opportunities for regional and global patrons to make
mischief through their durable local proxies.

If regime collapse occurs in Syria, a disorganized triumph
by various armed Sunni Arab groups, some with a significant Islamist tinge, and
a messy clean-up operation by the West, Turkey, and the Gulf States appears to
be in the offing.

I don’t think anybody is terribly interested in that kind of
outcome.

The whole Sunni-Shi’a/spillover into Lebanon scenario is
bandied about a lot, but I think the ghost at the regime change banquet, as it
were, is not another round of misery for little Lebanon; it is the prospect of more
Kurd-related heartburn for rising regional power Turkey.

A sign of Turkish sensitivities is this banned map showing
the distribution of ethnic Kurdish populations across northeastern Syria,
eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and parts of Iran.

As a disgruntled content screener/whistleblower revealed
, this map is banned on Facebook in Turkey (together with “blatant (obvious) depiction
of camel toes and moose knuckles”):

As the Syrian conflict has militarized and the armed
opposition has acquired a Sunni sectarian tinge accentuated by its Gulf backing,
Syrian Kurds (who make up perhaps 9% of the population) have for the most part
sat on the fence.

The Syrian National Council, a bastion of Arab chauvinism
thanks to its domination by the Muslim Brotherhood (Kurds are of Iranian, not
Arab ethnicity) has put down its marker:

Samir Nashar, now a
member of the seven person General Secretariat of the SNC was even more
explicit, in August 2011 saying “We accuse the Kurdish parties of not
effectively participating in the Syrian revolution. It seems that these parties continue to bet
on a dialogue with the regime. This stance will certainly have consequences
after the fall of the regime.”

As the struggle has militarized, Kurds probably find even
less reasons for reassurance. The anti-government
armed groups competing for Gulf emirate support have displayed a certain Arab
Islamist fervor admixed with the anti-Iranian xenophobia that is de rigeur
these days.

If a Sunni majority regime takes power in Damascus, it will
probably find itself wrangling with its Kurdish population, with the
possibility that the struggles of energized and/or threatened Syrian Kurds will
find an echo in eastern Turkey.

It would appear that Turkey’s reluctance to push forward
with overthrowing the Assad regime and midwifing the creation of a friendly new
Syrian government reflects its concern that a pickup in Damascus will be offset
by headaches in Kurdistan.

Juan Cole jumped the gun a bit by attributing the hundred+ deaths in the Syrian town of Houla to a Syrian Army
artillery assault.

In a perverse way, a massacre by the Syrian military would
have been almost a stabilizing phenomenon.

It would have placed the bad-guy hat firmly and irrevocably
on the heads of the Syrian armed forces.

It would also have served as an affirmation that the Assad
regime is in complete command of the security forces and responsible for the
atrocities committed against Syrian civilians.

And it would have given Dr. Cole added ammunition to argue for a new humanitarian intervention in Syria against the convenient
and vulnerable target of the Assad regime, one that might banish the embarrassing
memory of the last intervention he promoted: the fiasco in Libya.

Instead, the Syrian conflict appears to be spiraling
out of control, with Syrian army military commanders either turning a blind eye
to, condoning, or supporting the activities of local death squads.

The picture, murky as it is, of the atrocity at Houla is of
a fierce battle between government and insurrectionary forces in Houla,
followed perhaps by a tactical withdrawal by the rebels. Then some combination of soldiers and pro-government
irregulars moved in for a massacre that might have been local score-settling
for the assassination of a pro-government informer in a nearby village, a horrific
warning to Syrian soldiers who defect (Houla was reportedly a refuge for many defectors
and their families), or a brutal escalation in COIN-style terror.

In any case, the people who perpetrated the atrocity
apparently knew who they were looking for, if a persuasive account in the
Guardian is accurate:

"They came in
armoured vehicles and there were some tanks," said the boy. "They
shot five bullets through the door of our house. They said they wanted Aref and
Shawki, my father and my brother. They then asked about my uncle, Abu Haidar. They
also knew his name."

From the point of view of the Assad regime, credible
accusations that its military, security personnel, and irregulars are operating
death squads shred its rather threadbare claim to the role of protector of
Syria’s citizens against terrorists.

As Patrick Cockburn points out in a lengthy piece in Counterpunch,
the Annan peace process was something of a lifeline for Assad. The regime has
demonstrated considerably more forbearance than the rebels, who would prefer to
see the peace process collapse, and had little to gain and much to lose from
the carnival of massacre in Houla.

From the point of view of Assad’s patrons in Russia and
China, Houla hints that Assad is losing control of the military and security
apparatus, casting severe doubts on his abilities to manage a political
transition for Syria.

The government in Damascus yesterday
appeared to be somewhat leaderless and seemed slow to take on board the impact
of an outrage in which people across the world are blaming the Syrian
authorities for the murder and mutilation of children. “I get the impression
that there is nobody in firm control of Syrian policy and the Syrian armed
forces,” said a diplomat yesterday.

Therefore, Russia and China have both been prompt to call for an investigation of the massacre at
Houla.

Possible but unlikely outcomes are that Houla turns out to have
been some hideous false flag operation, or some local freelance murder spree.

If, on the other hand, evidence shows that the official
security and military apparatus, presumably at a local or regional level,
orchestrated the operation, I expect that Beijing and Moscow will be very interested to see
if Assad can enforce accountability and demonstrate, to the satisfaction of
Russia and the PRC if not the international community, that he can punish and
reassign the commanders and security chiefs responsible for dealing the Annan
plan so conspicuous a setback.

If Assad can’t do it, it is possible that Russia, which is reportedly
impatient for a change at the top in Syria, will probably find somebody who
can.

It does not appear that Russia or China (or, for that
matter, Iran) are interested in backing proxies in a sectarian civil war in
Syria. They will support the Annan plan
and the political process as long as they see a chance for a successor regime
to claim, even in some diminished way, the mantle of Syrian national legitimacy.

If the government becomes irrevocably identified with death
squads as well as the well-known brutality of its military and security
apparatus, Beijing and Moscow will probably throw in their losing hand.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Back in February I wrote for Asia Times about the Chinese diplomatic
initiative on Syria, which is now largely represented by the Annan peace
plan. At the time, I wrote China’s plan
had a chance, albeit slim, because, for all the brave talk emanating from the
Gulf, Turkey, the EU, and the West nobody seemed particularly eager to step up
and destroy the Assad regime.

Simply imploding the
Assad regime to spite Iran would appear to be easy, but has not happened.

Turkey is already providing safe havens for the Free Syrian Army, but
apparently has not unleashed it. Western Iraq is aboil with doctrinaire Sunni
militants happy to stick it to the Alawite regime, and Qatar has allegedly
already laid the groundwork for underemployed Libyan militants to find
profitable occupation fighting alongside the opposition in Syria, but utter
bloody chaos has yet to erupt.

The fact that Aleppo and Damascus have only been ravaged by two car bombs is
perhaps a sign of Wahabbist restraint, and may have been taken by the PRC as a
sign that the Gulf Cooperation Council's commitment to overthrowing Assad is
not absolute.

Of course, recently Damascus was ravaged by two 1000 kg car
bombs and a similar attack in Aleppo was averted by Syrian government security.

Syrian
rebels battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have begun receiving
significantly more and better weapons in recent weeks, an effort paid for by
Persian Gulf nations and coordinated in part by the United States, according to
opposition activists and U.S. and foreign officials.

…

Material is being stockpiled in Damascus, in Idlib near the
Turkish border and in Zabadani on the Lebanese border. Opposition activists who
two months ago said the rebels were running out of ammunition said this week
that the flow of weapons — most still bought on the black market in neighboring
countries or from elements of the Syrian military — has significantly increased
after a decision by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other gulf states to provide
millions of dollars in funding each month.

Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood also said it has opened its own supply
channel to the rebels, using resources from wealthy private individuals and
money from gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, said Mulham al-Drobi,
a member of the Brotherhood’s executive committee.

The new supplies reversed months of setbacks for the rebels that
forced them to withdraw from their stronghold in the Baba Amr neighborhood of
Homs and many other areas in Idlib and elsewhere.

The effect of the new arms appeared evident in Monday’s clash
between opposition and government forces over control of the rebel-held city of
Rastan, near Homs. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said
rebel forces who overran a government base had killed 23 Syrian soldiers

Helluva way to run a cease-fire.

The simplest explanation is that the United States and the Gulf
nations have decided to drive a stake into the heart of the shaky ceasefire and
let ‘er rip in Syria, consequences be damned.

This would fit in with the near-universal desire to get rid of
Assad, while having the collateral benefit of administering a ostentatious
public rebuke to China’s efforts to drive the Middle Eastern political process
in ways that don’t suit the United States and Saudi Arabia.

That’s the most likely explanation.

However, the Obama administration’s queasiness concerning
uncontrolled regime collapse in Syria driven by hardened Islamist fighters and
the Muslim Brotherhood instead of cuddly, pro-Western liberal intellectuals
seems to have become more overt since the car bombings in Damascus.

So I wonder if this article is something in the nature of a push
by Saudi Arabia to reinforce the narrative of inevitable Syrian Armageddon fueled
by aid from the Gulf, and thereby encourage the Obama administration to give up
on the peace process, indeed any ideas of a managed process, and let the
insurrection take its course…and of course, take on the responsibility for
dealing with Syria, or what’s left of it, once Assad is gone.

To me, the takeaway paragraphs were:

Officials in the
region said that Turkey’s main concern is where the United States stands, and
whether it and others will support armed protection for a safe zone along the
border or back other options that have been discussed.

…

The Sunni-led gulf states, which would
see the fall of Assad as a blow against Shiite Iran, would welcome such
assistance, but they would like a more formal approach. One gulf official
described the Obama administration’s gradual evolution from an initial refusal
to consider any action outside the political realm to a current position
falling “between ‘here’s what we need to do’ and ‘we’re doing it.’”“Various people are hoping that the
U.S. will step up its efforts to undermine or confront the Syrian regime,” the
gulf official said. “We want them to get rid” of Assad.

Not exactly a profile in courage by the counter-revolutionary
kings, sheiks, and emirs of the Arabian peninsula.

I’m pretty sure that the Gulf states could bring down Assad by
themselves, albeit through proxies, at the cost of a few million dollars.

So the issue here is mainly of GCC gutlessness and an attempt to
get America on the hook for dealing with the Syria mess once Assad is in exile
in Russia, hanging from a lamp post or whatever.

The bottom line is, the future of Syria—at least
how its political process and insurrection play out over the next few months—is
in the hands of President Obama.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

My recent piece for Asia Times is somewhat more topical than usual, so I’m
shooting it out as an e-mail to China Matters readers.

Looking at today’s shenanigans, and Chen’s metamorphosis
from brave legal activist to handwringing exile in waiting, I have the distinct
impression that people invested in the current freedom fighter vs. tyrant
polarity prevailed on Chen to blow this deal up.

Think about it. If
the deal went through and Chen was studying law in Tianjin under the
ostentatiously solicitous care of the PRC, what happens to other dissidents who
might want asylum?

US Embassy picks up the phone, confirms that Chen is hitting
the books and putting on weight, and tells the dissident, no asylum but how
about a deal like Chen’s?

I find Chen’s explanation of why he reneged on the deal somewhat
unconvincing.

As to his rather belated concern over his wife’s well-being,
Chen had already revealed in his video address to Wen Jiabao that local goons
in Shandong had rolled his wife in a quilt and used her as a piñata for hours,
just for revealing the details of his house arrest to foreign media. What did he expect they would do when he
actually escaped?

The escape itself, is of course a riddle wrapped inside an
enigma. Part of the Chen legend was the intense,
up-close surveillance he had to endure.
How did he really evade it? Was
there a deal? Did that deal blow up too?

Anyway, Chen and his minders have burned their bridges to
the Obama administration. They are
already reaching out to the Congress as an alternative to the State
Department. Maybe his brain trust has
decided to throw its lot in with the Republican anti-Communists instead of
Democratic human rights neo-liberalists.
That might make for some less-than-convivial times if Chen gets that
ride on Hillary Clinton’s plane that he’s abjectly begging for.

Here’s the text of my Asia Times piece, which appeared under
the title:

If With news reports that legal activist Chen Guangcheng has
agreed to be resettled inside China with his family away from his tormenters in
Shandong, to an as yet undisclosed university where he can pursue his legal
studies, the United States and China probably both breathed sighs of relief.

The United States does not have to scupper its strategic
dialogue with China in order to live up to its role as human rights champion
and scourge of communist authoritarianism by granting asylum to Chen.

The People’s Republic of China can, however belatedly and
grudgingly, have an opportunity for its Judge Bao moment: acting as the
benevolent protector of deserving innocents suffering at the hands of brutal
and corrupt local authorities (as that venerable jurist has done in countless
books and TV serials).

But not so fast.

The sheen went off the deal with alarming speed as reporters
and skeptical activists communicated with an increasingly agitated Chen in Chaoyang
Hospital in Beijing. Reunited with his
family, he learned from his wife of her harsh treatment in Shandong after his
flight, and her desire not to stay in China.
Chen is now saying he wants to
come to the United States with his family, in a switch certain to embarrass and
irritate the Obama administration.

Chen is receiving a sympathetic hearing, if not
encouragement, from Bob Fu of China Aid.
China Aid is a non-profit in Midland, Texas that lobbies for religious
freedom and on behalf of Christian house churches in China. Fu has spoken proudly of his organization’s close
relationship with Chen during his difficult years in China. Fu was perhaps the first person overseas that
Chen contacted after his escape.

Mr. Fu would prefer that Chen Guangcheng come to the United
States “for some peaceful time” instead of remaining in China, as he told the
Texas Tribune well before the deal began to unravel.

Even though Chen declined the offer to
come to the United States after his escape, Fu said Chen should reconsider.

“I cannot feel there is a viable
option for him to continue in China given the current environment,” Fu said.
“My hope is, if Chen is able to get permission from China to have his family
members come to the U.S. for some time, some peaceful time, and receive some
medical treatment, the U.S. can facilitate that effort.”

One hears echoes of Mr. Fu’s argument in Chen’s statement
after he entered Chaoyang Hospital:

The British television
program Channel 4 News also interviewed Mr. Chen, who reportedly said: “My
biggest wish is to leave the country with my family and rest for a while. I
haven’t had a rest day in seven years.”

The US State Department, however, is pushing back across the
board at the implication that they slighted Chen’s desires and dumped him back
into Chinese hands.

What started out as a muted triumph for US diplomacy may
turn into an episode of unexpected and unwelcome estrangement between the US
government and the human rights and democracy activists it wishes to champion,
and a win for China if Chen slides uncertainly into exile and irrelevance, his
heroic legacy tarnished by an embarrassing fiasco,

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is allowing Chen to have
free access to the press to make a spectacle of his handwringing. Most recently, CNN:

"I would like to say to President
Obama — please do everything you can to get our family out," Chen told
CNN, according to a translation of his quote. He also accused U.S. embassy
officials of pushing him hard to leave on Wednesday.

"The embassy kept lobbying me to
leave and promised to have people stay with me in the hospital, but this
afternoon as soon as I checked into the hospital room, I noticed they were all
gone."CNN correspondent Stan Grant said he
had interviewed Chen in his Beijing hospital bed at around 3:00 am Thursday
(1900 GMT Wednesday) with his wife sitting by his bedside.

While events sort
themselves out in Beijing, conspiracy theorists can start their engines and
explore the interesting question of how a blind man, allegedly under video
surveillance and with local blocking of cell phones, was able to escape house
arrest, evade dozens of goons charged with keeping him bottled up, and
rendezvous with a sympathizer to drive away from the town…and have his departure
not detected for several days.

Local security was pretty extensive, as Chen himself stated
in his video addressed to Premier Wen Jiabao, which he recorded in Beijing
after his escape. As translated by
Steven Jiang of CNN:

From what I learned,
other than various officials, each team guarding me has more than 20 people.
They have three teams with a total of 70 to 80 people. When more netizens tried
to visit me recently, they had several hundred people at one time and
completely sealed off my village.

Starting with my home, they station a team inside the house and another one
outside guarding the four corners. Further out, they block every road leading
to my house, all the way to the village entrance. They even have 7 to 8 people
guarding bridges in neighboring villages. These corrupt officials draw people
from neighboring villages into this and they have cars patrolling areas within
a 5-kilometer radius of my village or even further.

Besides all these layers of security around my house -- I think there are 7 to
8 layers -- they have also numbered all the roads leading to my village, going
up to 28 with guards assigned to them daily. The whole situation is just so
over the top. I understand the number of officials and policemen who
participate in my persecution adds up to some 100 people.

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers,
an NGO dedicated to ending forced sterilization and abortions, told Asia Times
that Chen’s escape was “a miracle”. That
was a characterization that China Aid was happy to echo.

Artist, dissident, and gadfly Ai Weiwei puckishly declared
that Chen’s blindness was an advantage in his nighttime escape: “It’s all the
same to him.” But clearly it wasn’t, at
least in the matter of physical impediments like ponds and rivers.

Littlejohn told Asia Times that she learned via a Skype
session with He Peirong, driver of the vehicle that spirited Chen to Beijing, just
prior to her detention by public security personnel, that Chen had taken a
spill in some water on his way and showed up soaking wet; news reports in
Beijing reported he had also hurt his leg climbing over a wall.

These circumstances beg the question of why he did not bring
his (sighted) wife and child along on the escape, especially since an activist
claimed that Chen’s subsequent decision to remain inside China was dictated by
the threat that his wife would be beaten to death if he tried to leave.

In a video statement Chen made before entering the embassy,
he called on Premier Wen Jiabao to order an investigation of his case and the
brutal circumstances of his detention, and to assure the safety of his family.

For want of more facts and a better explanation, some news
outlets speculate that perhaps Chen’s escape was orchestrated or enabled by the
relatively liberal faction of the CCP that is now in ascendancy with the fall
of Chongqing kingpin Bo Xilai. The
theory is that Chen’s escape would make security chief and one-time Bo ally
Zhou Yongkang look like an idiot, thereby further weakening the hardline
faction.

Perry Link, the well-known scholar of China’s democracy
movement who assisted Fang Lizhi’s refuge in the US Embassy in 1989, commented
to Asia Times on the questions surrounding Chen’s escape:

It's impossible,
obviously, that he did it alone. And clear that some idealistic
rights-advocates helped him. The open question is whether people
"inside the system" helped, and if so at what level. It seems
to me plausible, as some have said, that hirelings in Shandong helped; it seems
to me less plausible, but still possible--as others have speculated--that
people at the top let it happen, as part of the mafia back-stabbing at that
level.

The situation was apparently resolved in Beijing after four
days of intense negotiations under the aegis of US Assistant Secretary of State
for East Asia Kurt Campbell and input from noted China lawyer and Harvard
professor Jerome Cohen. The deal, by
which Chen would, at his insistence, remain in China with guarantees from the
Chinese and US governments for the proper and humane treatment of himself and
his family, lacked the triumphalist celebration of freedom, Western values, and
the human spirit that might have energized Chinese dissidents…and failed to put
the United States squarely on “the right side of history,” the Chinese march to
democracy that the US considers inevitable.

Jerome Cohen described it as a “middle path,” “a kind of
path we are trying hard to create, a space between prison and total freedom” of
the kind that Ai Weiwei currently occupies.

If the deal capsizes on Chen’s anxieties, and becomes an
embarrassment for the US government and political windfall for President
Obama’s Republican critics in an election year, it may be called something
else: appeasement.

For its part, the Chinese government, after a complete
lockdown of Internet keywords involving Chen, “blind man”, “The Shawshank
Redemption” (a prison-escape drama) and “Flight 898” (the number for the United
Airlines Beijing to New York flight that Chen might take into exile), handled
the affair quickly and discretely.

The first official acknowledgement of Chen Guangcheng’s
escape and refuge in the US Embassy came in an op-ed titled US Embassy in quandary over Chen, which was posted just after midnight on May 2
in Global Times, Xinhua’s nationalist
news outlet. The op-ed was carried on
its English language edition available in China, but not the Chinese-language
edition.

Global Times, which had previously expressed exasperation
with the prolonged and extrajudicial detention of Chen and the unfavorable
international attention it provoked, deliberately shied away from any
confrontation with the US government, State Department, or their human rights
policies, and instead focused on a very narrow and easily finessed issue: the
potential negative consequences for the United States of providing Chen—and, in
the future, other dissidents—with a haven:

If petitioners'
requests are not met by domestic authorities and turn to the US embassy, this
is not only embarrassing to China but also puts the US in an awkward position.

The US embassy would have no interest in turning itself into a petition office
receiving Chinese complaints. It is easier just preaching universal values to
the Chinese public, and occasionally, helping a few exemplary cases that best
illustrate US intentions. It is never willing to involve itself in too many
detailed disputes in Chinese society.

China, of course, has an ample supply of “petitioners” whose
“requests are not met by domestic authorities.”
The implication is that the United States has a choice: it can either
repurpose its embassy as an overbooked hostel for persecuted activists, or it
can engage with the Chinese government on the vital economic, diplomatic, and
security issues of the day.

The next morning the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a
statement in the form of a press conference Q&A “On the Matter of ChenGuangcheng Entering the US Embassy”, declaring that the US embassy had engaged
in “activities incompatible with its function” by hosting Chen. The Chinese government demanded an apology
(which US sources promptly declared was not going to happen) and the statement
declared:

The Chinese side notes that the US side
declares it will give weight to the Chinese side’s demands and concerns, and
guarantee to take appropriate measures so that these sorts of incidents shall
not be repeated again.

It is hoped that the
US embassy in China can distance itself from activities that do not match its
functions. It should gain the favorable impression of China's public rather
than being an escape route for more extreme elements.

Whatever happens, the Chinese government will apparently
achieve its desired objective: crestfallen activists will get the message that
the US is not a single-minded supporter of principled dissent, and its embassy
is not a reliable safe haven.

If the deal collapses, and the “middle path” endorsed by
Cohen and Campbell evaporates, it will also represent a return to the familiar
if not particularly productive polarities of human rights vs. authoritarianism
that usually characterize US-China relations.

A relatively amicable resolution of Chen Guangcheng’s case could
have been taken as an indicator of a Chinese pivot away from brutal repression
that has characterized the PRC’s “weiwen” or stability maintenance regime over
the last few years—and an indication of tacit US support as the CCP navigates
through its leadership transition and, perhaps toward a more liberal, law-based
polity.

In the early 2000s, the CCP and the PRC experimented with a migration
from Party-led, purely authoritarian social control to a regime that would
achieve its policy goals less directly through nominally democratic legislation
applied and enforced by local governments and courts, and some monetary and
administrative incentives.

Instead of a party cadre telling you what to do, in other
words, you would do it yourself, having accepted and internalized the relevant
laws and rules and weighed the costs and benefits.

A prime field for application of this approach was in the
delicate field of family planning, the most intrusive and personal element of
government control. Family planning, in
the context of China’s perceived need to control its population, traditionally
involved taking a number of unpopular steps from birth scheduling to sterilization
and abortion that were, depending on the whim of the official involved and the
eye of the beholder, either encouraged, mandatory, coerced, or forced.

Instead, new laws, applied in concert with flexible,
responsible, and higher-quality reproductive services and some financial incentives,
would lessen the coercive character of the system.

The new system relied on effective access to the legal
system by the people from the bottom up, instead of only supervision by the
Party from the top down, to detect, remedy, and deter abuses.

In Shandong, in the municipality of Linyi at least, this
attempt at subtle social engineering did not go well, and that is where Chen
Guangcheng came in.

Chen Guangcheng educated himself as a lawyer to help people
in his community in the rural environs of Linyi obtain legal redress for local
government abuses. In Linyi, abuses in
the family planning system appear to have been medieval in their callous
brutality.

Activist lawyer Teng Biao assisted Chen Guangcheng with his
interviews and investigations in 2005. His case notes, translated and circulated by
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, provide a chilling picture of gangsterized
local rule.

One case involved a 59-year old man who was taken hostage
because they couldn’t find his daughter, who was targeted for sterilization:

At about six o’ clock in the afternoon
[of the 19th] he was found lying by the side of

Yuncai bridge when his relatives went
to the Family Planning office again to look for

him. After he regained consciousness,
his relatives knew the story: “The Family Planning Officials tortured and
starved him for a whole day. Then they asked him to go back to look for his
daughter. He asked for food but was refused. At about four o’clock in the afternoon,
a female town official (Tingju Zhang) went back with a strong smell of wine. After
beating another two elderly persons (seventy years old), she took him to thecourtyard and beat his head with
brooms. Three brooms were broken. Then she slapped him in the face. At about
five o’ clock she pushed him into a small room. She asked him to sit on the
cold cement floor and unbend his legs. She took the lead to stamp on his legs.
Other officials followed her and some also slapped on his face and poured cold water
on his head. He said: “I will sue you!” She shouted: “Sue me in the court if
you want. It costs only ten thousand Yuan [approximately $1500] to take your
life! You are the biggest trash of all the forty thousand people in Shuanghou!”
He said: “I have been a Party member for over thirty years. I’m not trash!” She
said: “I joined the party in 1998,but I can beat an old Party member like you!”

Sordid profit (the Family Planning Bureau was allowed, even
expected to generate revenue to cover its expenses) led to the establishment of
euphemistically named “Family Planning Learning Centers” where relatives of
people who sought to evade sterilization or abortion were detained under miserable
conditions and subjected to brutal beatings in the name of re-education
reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution—and at their own expense.

Chen
and Teng ran the rough numbers, and they are astounding.

On earth how many people were illegally
detained in the Learning Class? According to

Chen Guangcheng’s rough statistics,
Linyi city has a population of 10,800,000 and

130,000 people (12‰ of the population)
were forced to have ligation. Three to 30 of each victim’s relatives or
neighbors were implicated. This amounts to 520,000 people if we count 4 for
each victim. Everyone was detained 1 to 40 days and in total it was 1,560,000 days
(about 4,300 years) if we count 3 days for each person. Each person was charged
100 Yuan each day (some places didn’t charge while some other places charged
several times. But most places charged this amount of money). It amounts to
more than 93,000,000 Yuan if we count 60 for each person per day. This is just
a conservative estimate. But what the farmers’ hard-earned money bought was
outrage, humiliation and horror.

Despite nonstop harassment and intimidation of their
potential witnesses by the local authorities, Chen Guangcheng and his legal
allies collected enough evidence for the National Family Planning and
Population Commission to post a rebuke of abuses in Linyi on their website in August
2005, and for a handful of local officials to be disciplined.

This uplifting story of legal redress did not have a happy
second act, however.

Vengeful local officials pursued Chen with trumped-up
accusations of damaging property and blocking traffic, and a kangaroo court
sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.

The central government did not intervene, possibly because
Chen’s image had evolved beyond local barefoot lawyer to internationally
recognized human rights activist. In
2006, he made the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world, making
it possible for his enemies to paint him as a tool of anti-Chinese forces.

During his legal struggles, Chen had also become associated
with the network of lawyers in the “weiquan” or rights-protection movement, a
number of whom are evangelical Christians using the legal system to challenge
the communist state’s authority and legitimacy by handling awkward, hot button
cases like defense of Falungong practitioners.

In 2008, the US government-funded democracy promotion NGO,
the National Endowment for Democracy, perhaps did Chen no favors by announcinghe was co-winner of the 2008 Democracy Award.

The Democracy Award statuette is modeled on the Goddess of
Democracy, the Statue of Liberty-inspired figure which protesting students
erected in Tiananmen Square just before June 4, 1989, facing the massive
portrait of Chairman Mao and brandishing its freedom torch under his nose. It is therefore a red flag (of the
unfavorable, slap-in-the-face kind) to the current Chinese government,
redolent, at least to the CCP leadership, of sedition, subversion, and regime
change.

When Chen served his full term and emerged from prison in
2010, the local government, in what looks like a pointed repudiation of the
law-based regime the central government had been attempting to promote, placed
Chen under house arrest using the ancient Maoist revolutionary formulation that
his relation to the polity was one of “a contradiction between the people and
the enemy” (calling for the harshest measures, as opposed to “contradictions
within the people,” which are to be resolved through exhaustive and uplifting
jawboning).

Again, the central government did nothing, probably because
it was still very much in the thrall of its Beijing Olympics-related crackdown
mentality and an obsession with “social order.”
Beijing outsourced repression, showering “wei wen” grants on the
provinces, apparently in a no-questions-asked spirit. In Linyi, whatever monies didn’t end up in
the pockets of local officials as graft funded the gargantuan security cordon
of minimum-wage goons surrounding Chen’s residence.

Meanwhile, the local authorities went to town on Chen
Guangcheng after he made a video detailing conditions of his house arrest, as
he described in his post-escape appeal addressed to Wen Jiabao:

They broke into my
house and more than a dozen men assaulted my wife. They pinned her down and
wrapped her in a blanket, beating and kicking her for hours. They also
violently assaulted me. …
When they came to my house to assault us, Zhang Jian, the deputy Party
secretary in charge of law enforcement in Shuanghou township, said to me
unequivocally: "We don't care about the law and we are ignoring the law --
what can you do about it?" He repeated led people to my home to attack and
rob us.

Li Xianli, who heads Team 1 that illegally confined me in my house, repeatedly
beat my wife -- once even pulling her off the bike to assault her. He also beat
my mother. Simply monstrous. Li Xianqiang, an official with the township's
judicial authority, beat my wife last year, gravely injuring her left arm.

News of the over-the-top supervision, harassment, and
beatings spread throughout the world and Chen’s situation evolved into a public
relations nightmare. Affairs reached
their ludicrous apotheosis when actor Christian Bale and a CNN crew drove eight
hours to Linyi to visit Chen in December 2011, only to be driven off a pack of
local goons.

Then came the great escape.

If the deal holds—indeed if the PRC does not gleefully usher
Chen out of China over his well-advertised flip-flopping in order to highlight
American humiliation--a low-key resolution of the Chen Guangcheng affair could
bring a temporary relaxation of the tensions between the United States and
China.

However, even if Chen Guangcheng remains in China, resolutely
maintains his appointed role as “legal activist” and steers clear of
“anti-government dissident”, the CCP may find its enthusiasm for legal
accountability limited—and the impulse to harass and intimidate his associates
and sympathizers irresistible.

The Obama administration has shown a tendency to publicly
extend the hand of conciliation—in this case, probably quite welcome to the new
generation of Chinese leaders looking for political and diplomatic breathing
space as they grind through their transition—but quickly switch to a resentful
shove when affairs don’t evolve as it thinks they should.

With US-China relations hardening into a zero sum
configuration, the United States will probably discover ample cause and
opportunity to challenge the PRC on human rights in the future.

A bigger risk for China, however, is perhaps the problem
Chen Guangcheng is already working on: family planning.

Despite the leveling-off of Chinese population growth and
calls to relax the one-child policy, China’s demographic boffins have decided
to retain family planning at least through 2020.

The policy appears to have a certain eugenic tinge to
it. Urban families are reproducing at
below the replacement rate of 1.5 (Shanghai is at a rock-bottom 0.7 ratio);
meanwhile, rural families are pressing to have more children, especially sons,
and are also feeding the migrant population—which accounts for 25% of women of
childbearing age and remains largely beyond the reach of the family planning
system. Rural families are
disproportionate targets of family planning policies, and are
disproportionately likely to suffer abuse at the hands of undertrained,
underpaid, callous, and unaccountable local officials.

If the horrors of Linyi are repeated and multiplied
nationwide and China’s peasants acquire a unifying sense of grievance and
demand for redress, the PRC may have more to worry about than the legal
activism of Chen Guangcheng.